Good practice:

Guidelines and tool for the verification of construction and demolition waste management reports

In February 2008, the Royal Decree 105/2008 published in Spain regulates the production and management of construction and demolition waste (CDW), requires the property owner to draw up a CDW Management Study and establishes that the contractor must draw up a CDW Management Plan, which must be approved by the property owner and the Construction Management. On 3 September 2012, Decree 112/2012 was published in the Official Gazette of the Basque Country, this decree regulates the production and management of waste, forcing the property owner to draw up a Final Management Report, in which the management carried out with the CDW must accredited.
In this decree, the professional associations are involved in the verification of the final management reports. Another remarkable feature of the above decree is the proposal of a tool to facilitate the traceability of the data and the calculation, and to allow its verification. This web application, called EEH-AURREZTEN, was developed in 2013 by the Basque Government's public company “Ihobe” and engages all the agents involved in the construction project: the property owner, the contractor, the city council and the professional association. It is a free application that only requires registration on the Ihobe website. In addition, this tool contains the templates for drafting all the documents and is supported by the ratios set out in the Decree 112/2012 for calculating the generation of CDW.

For the development of the web tool and application there is no information on the human resources required. However, it is necessary to access a database containing information on the ratios of construction and demolition waste as well as the established management prices.

The tool will enable more than 24,000 construction companies, 3,000 property development companies and 251 town councils in the Basque Country to comply with environmental legislation.
In 2019, the web version of the application was published, replacing the previous Excel format and facilitating the use of the tool. The fact that a web-based application has been developed implies that the procedure established for the verification of reports has been well accepted by all actors.

The tool is only available in the regional or state language, which could be an impediment to the exchange of experiences.

A new feature is that the entities to which these guidelines are addressed are the Official Associations competent to endorse the project and the end of the work, because their technicians are competent to sign the work whose reports are subject to verification.
In addition, it should also be emphasised the recommendation of a support tool in order to assist all parties involved in the execution of a construction or demolition project, which is part of the obligations established for the different agents considered in Decree 112/2012.
This type of practice can inspire any region to create a tool tailored to the actors involved in waste management and even invite them to incorporate it in their directives to achieve better data traceability, transparency and good communication among agents.